Friday, November 27, 2009

Brooks Bouquet Scarf

A very generous lady on the Rigid Heddel Group by the name of Patty Anne has great videos on weaving on youtube and her own website. One of these shows Brooks Bouquet and I just had to try it after seeing it so clearly explained.
I had some oatmeal colored Blueface Leicester roving (from Wingham Wool works I think) and had top-whorled it into a yarn, a 2-py of about 14 wpi. I also had some already spun and dyed with avocado stones in store for a while so what, the heck, I though, I'll use these for a scarf on my knitters loom.
It was lovely to do until I began to get some tightening of the 2 outer warps each side, making the edge uneven and the center sag.
"Uinseach!" I thought (I often abuse myself in Irish), "you've been tightening the first bouquet on either side and it's used up the warp too fast!". So, I had to hang weights off the sagging center ones to even things out. This worked pretty well so at least I learned something out if it (amadán).
The weights were actually dowel rods with a hook at the top which I put CD's on to make spindles but the CD's were gone (smashed - a weakness of the CD spindle) and they were lying there unloved. They now have a new role 'though I hope not to have to use them in this capacity too often.


Brooks Bouquet woven scart 2
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I really like this scarf. It's very soft and light and long enough to loop 2 ends through (a fashion beloved by the cast of Eastenders las year - and OH found same in Germany while there this month).

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A little Tote

The Buddleia flower heads and leaves gave various shades of yellow. A fairly strong yarn, so I decided to use it to warp the Ashford Spinners Loom. Used more of the same for the weft plus some soft yarn in blue and some brown Alpaca.
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A small thing, but mine own :).

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Not so Slouchy, slouchy hat

A ball of 2-ply, light mauve (ish) hand-spun and another ball of off-white (dyed with afterwash from avocado pip dyebath). What to do with these strong, spingy yarns. Tempted by a slouchy beret in Simply Knit magazine so gave it a bash. A couple of rippings later, discovered I need to double the number of stitches (the pattern used a much thicker Debbie Bliss tweed chunky. Wnats more, if I didn't want to cut off the circulation to the scalp, I needed to decrease the last part at a much slower rate. However, I like it's suptle shades and it might suit unsuspecting daughter.
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